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Seminar in Barbarism

A true barbarian is much more than a long-haired muscleman with a big weapon. This is a myth conjured by Hollywood; film is a visual medium and they can’t be faulted for using visual cues.

But much escapes this visual medium as well, so I urge you to dump these images in the trail behind you as you venture forward.

If you are like me, you looked upon the American Indians as a race to be admired and perhaps imitated. What would it be like to stand on the same ground that your ancestors lived on, thousands of years ago? Americans rarely know what this feels like, and I think many of instinctively yearn for this.

Perhaps it’s a bit of romance, but compared to our mainstream western culture, their native spirituality comes straight out of the earth. Here is no hypocrisy, no dogma. And as underdogs, we know they fought a courageous fight against tremendous odds.

But for most of us, this is not our culture. We are attracted to a sincere, genuine culture, but we betray it if we are not sincere and genuine. Pull the eagle feather out of your hair! We seek such a culture that we can claim for our own!

Once we had one. The native folk of Northern Europe roamed over their homeland until the Roman Empire enslaved them and forced Christianity upon them. But we were not meek and mild slaves. The mighty Empire of Rome stood only until the barbarians of Europe chose to tear it down to its foundations. This also spelled the end of the barbarian culture, but enough remains of it and its myths that we can recover it and be inspired by it.

We continue to be inspired by the American Indians, and in many ways, they teach us to recover parts of our culture that we once thought lost.